pped to get breath,
and the heavenly fire drew into sight every foot, as it seemed, of that
vast ocean, cannonading it also with majestic artillery, the girl
sighed,

"Freedom is beautiful!"

"Oh, Virgie," Samson answered, covering her with his own coat, "if I
could buy you free, pore chile, I'd a-mos' go into slavery to save you
from dis night."

"I can die in there," Virgie said, pointing to the waves; "they must not
catch me."

A wail came out of the storm, so close before that it hushed them both,
and the lightning lifted upon their eyes a stranding vessel, so close,
it seemed, that they could touch it, and she was full of people,
hallooing, but not in any intelligible tongue.

As the black night fell upon this magic-lantern sketch they heard a
crash of wave and wood, and falling spars and awful shrieks, and, when
the next vivid flash of lightning came, nothing was visible but floating
substance, and spluttering cries came out of the bosom of the sea, and a
black man, flung, as if out of a cannon, upon a wave that drenched these
wanderers, struck the ground at their feet, and looked into Samson's
eyes as the convulsion of death seized his chest and feet.

Before they could speak to each other, the beach was full of similar
corpses, a moment before alive as themselves, and every one was naked
and black.

"It's a slave-ship, foundered yer," cried Samson.

He caught at a yawl-boat driving past him, in the many things that
drifted around their feet, and Virgie saw painted upon its bow the word
"_Ida_."

"Samson," she said, feeling all the influences of Princess Anne again,
and forgetting her own misery, "it's Mrs. Dennis's husband come home and
shipwrecked."

* * * * *

When Virgie next remembered, she was on a vast hill of sand, near a
lighthouse that was built upon it, and flashed its lenses sleepily upon
a sullen break of day, the mutual lights showing the tops of trees
rising out of the sand, where a forest had been buried alive, like
little twigs in amber.

Almost naked with fighting the storm, Samson Hat slept at her side,
peaceful as hale age and virtue could enjoy the balm of oblivion in
life.

"Happy are the black," thought the sick girl, "that take no thought on
things this white blood in me makes so big: on freedom and my father.
Father, do love me before I die!"

She knelt on the great sand hillock by Cape Henlopen and prayed till
she, too, lost her knowled